Tag Archive - anger


Do You Have the Guts to Be a Wimp?

May 16, 2012 in COUNSELING, GODSTUFF with 0 Comments

I preach and write a lot about looking at your own flaws and leaving other people alone. Nearly every time I do someone says to me, “But there comes a time when you have to stand up for yourself. You don’t want to be a wimp and let people walk all over you.”

Of course there’s a point to that somewhere. But perhaps the reason I lean so far the other direction is because the easiest thing in the world for me to do is “stand up for myself.” When I’m upset or offended, the first thing I want to do is lash out, verbally, and sometimes even physically. I find it takes far more guts to keep quiet than it does to speak out.   Continue Reading…

On Writing, prt. 3: Frustration and Anger

April 11, 2012 in MISCELLANY with 2 Comments

So the anxiety of this morning has turned to anger and frustration. The words won’t come out and, when they do, they feel awkward and strained. I know what I want to say but I do not know how to say it. I believe I am in this place as a direct result of reading back over everything this morning and hating it. I keep hearing that same voice that I hated this morning in what I write today and I am now self-conscious. This keeps me from accepting the words that are presenting themselves to me today and causes me to wrestle with new ways of saying what I haven’t even discovered I want to say yet.

The solution? Keep writing. And not only this, but keep writing down whatever comes to me. It is a first draft and, as Anne Lamott has observed, “first drafts always suck.” Perhaps I need to adjust my attitude. I need to stop thinking about writing this awesome book and just settle into writing a sucky first draft. Then perhaps I won’t be as angry and frustrated with myself when I write something that seems to suck.

Lesson: I cannot write a great book. What I can do is write a sucky first draft. In fact I’ll bet I can write the suckiest first draft that has ever been written.

Whew. I feel so much better now.

Back to it.

Religion, rights, politics, anger, hope

February 10, 2012 in GODSTUFF with 21 Comments

I support love. I support freedom and pluralism, grateful that I live in a country where I am free to believe in God but where no one HAS to. I believe that other people’s sexual lives are none of my business. Religiously, I believe that God is speaking to all people in all situations and all places, and that I don’t have to worry about trying to make other people live the way I think they should live. Everyone has the personal obligation to live according to their best understanding of how they should live. Everyone, including me, has the right to be wrong, both religiously and politically. No one, including me, is nearly as right about most things as we believe we are, including religion and politics. But my understanding of God is that even if someone else is wrong, that’s between them and God. I believe deeply (and hope passionately) that God will show others the same love and mercy that I hope God shows to me when I am wrong, and when I am doing the best I can but still failing or somehow missing the point.

Continue Reading…

Be the Change

May 5, 2011 in GODSTUFF with 8 Comments

Gandhi - quotes

Gandhi - quotes

One of Gandhi’s most famous quotes is, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” This pretty well wraps up the heart of true spirituality. True spirituality stops “waiting on the world to change,” recognizing that the world will not change until individual human beings change.

The reason this is not happening at the level it needs to is because we are each wired to think that others need to change more than we do. In fact, Richard Rohr says that the cycle of violence actually begins with comparison. We compare, we compete, we conflict, we conspire, we condemn and we then crucify with impunity. Comparing means that when I look at the world and think about what needs to be different, what I see is how much worse other people are than me. I think, “If they would just pull it together, this world would be a better place.” The problem is that everyone is doing this at the same time. I think you should change. You think I should change. Democrats think Republicans should change. Republicans think Democrats should change. Israelis think Palestinians should change. Palestinians think Israelis should change. Non-terrorists think terrorists should change, and terrorists think they are forced to be terrorists in order to get non-terrorists to change.

And the wheel goes ’round. Everyone in the world longs for change, but we long for it in others. And since we are so powerless to make others change, we become increasingly frustrated, and then vocal, and then insistent, and then forceful, and eventually violent. What is happening at the world level in terms of violence is happening constantly at the personal level in the heart of every human being on the planet. You think your marriage would be better if your spouse would change, and your spouse thinks the exact same thing — how much better the marriage would be if you would change. Most of us believe we are better than other people because we do  not allow our cycles of violence to erupt into actual physical violence, failing to see that the same root of violence grows in each of us. Yes, it’s good to pull the plant out before it blossoms into violence, but we must see that the root is exactly the same. Jesus understood this well.

Matthew 5:21-24 (ESV)
21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Jesus insightfully targets malice, contempt, and anger as the root of physical violence like murder. Even in most of those that never commit actual murder, the malice, contempt, and anger from which murder grows are alive and well — and often actually nurtured and excused, as we point the finger at others. Jesus then says that the answer to this is to be proactive, not in forcing the other to change, but in accepting personal responsibility and seeking reconciliation. He does not say that we are to seek reconciliation if we remember we have something against someone else, but rather if we remember that someone else has something against us. He puts each of us in the place of being the person who needs to change. And that is exactly what Gandhi does with “Be the change.”

And interesting enough, Jesus says we are to do this even if we are at worship. Love between each of us is therefore exalted as more important than religious ritual, as well it should be. Because love IS the expression of God in human life.

On the turning…

April 10, 2010 in GODSTUFF with 7 Comments

I will never cease to be a Free Methodist.  I am proud of our background and what our church has always stood for.  But I have to admit, I’m feeling a bit misled by the evangelical tradition in general lately.

The view of Christ, of God, etc., that I was taught is only about 100 years old, and it is taught as if it is the only way a person could ever think of God and be Christian.  It is soaked in American individualism, which is actually in opposition to the gospel, which is rooted in community.  It is formed primarily by enlightenment-era thinking, by modernism and rationalism (which strangely has led to incredibly irrational positions on a lot of things).  It is extremely narrow in the way it is typically taught and practiced in the West.  It tends to see the Devil as being external to ourselves, and sees him/it around most every corner.  It tends to be extremely threatened by people with other points of view, religious or otherwise.  It seeks to control and correct, rather than to care and connect.  It sees not only the devil but even God as outside of us — as remote, as far from us, as “up there,” or “out there.”  In so doing, it encourages the view that I must “find” God somewhere, when Jesus clearly said God is already here, and that God is “within you.”  The use of that phrase reminds me of how quick many evangelicals are to call someone else’s beliefs “New Age,” or otherwise label them as heretics of some kind, as if God cannot be trusted to reveal himself to those who seek him.  Since so many evangelicals are Republicans, this tendency to oppose and label often shows up politically in a knee-jerk readiness to conclude that people are “socialists,” or “communists,” or “anti-capitalists,” or some other label that assumes that someone who disagrees with them must be generally up to something vicious, devious, unAmerican, or sacrilegious.

Evangelicals have been involved for generations in the enterprise of proving this or that from “the Word,” or backing things up scripturally.”  Generally this is a huge waste of time and accomplishes little, except to reinforce the egos of the arguers — to produce a victor and a vanquished.  This need to beat others down theologically, to “win” religious debates with others, does not actually solve any problems.  It is, rather, the root of a much deeper problem, which is the problem of dualistic thinking — having to see everything in terms of winners and losers, victors and vanquished, right and wrong, sacred and secular, and — by extension — loved by God and not loved by God.

I have been fascinated, confused, and shocked by how often I will see professing Christians post paranoid, apocalyptic, doom and gloom pieces of hysterical drivel on Facebook, and then turn around and say that in spite of this their “hope is in Christ.”  Maybe that which we hope in cannot always be seen, but hope itself is easily apparent.  So is its lack.  The whole world view is barely held together by a thread of hope, or logic, or anything else.  It lacks a sense not only of hope, but of history.  It is both shallow and narrow (“shallow, and narrow, there’s a fountain flowing shallow and narrow”).

I think this view loves its apocalyptic visions perhaps even more than it loves God.  People with this view of the world wouldn’t know what to do if the world were to suddenly become a happier place — they would have to look harder for the antichrist.  The world just isn’t an interesting place to be unless it’s two seconds from destruction.  And absolutely everything is a sign of that impending destruction.  People are not simply wrong, they are malevolent.  Situations are not merely problems to be solved, they are signs of the end.

Of course not every evangelical holds these views.  I, after all, am an evangelical and I don’t hold any of the above views and I know that many don’t.  But those who speak the loudest, who attract the most attention and form the popular opinion that many people hold — many of them do hold these views.  And even among those who would read this and say they don’t hold these views, many people still reveal these attitudes in their everyday conversations and take on things.

But God is great, and God is good.  Let us thank him.  Let us turn from paranoia, anger, fear, argument, and triumphalism.  Let us stop using God to avoid God, for He is here now.